hatthew

What do you mean? You could always answer questions without any barriers, and partial answers were acceptable. Unless you're talking about protected questions (very rare), or you had such a fundamental misunderstanding of the site that you got answer-banned.

The discussion around who gets a green checkmark and +15 rep was bad enough. I can't imagine how it would be if there was real money involved.

I feel like the "repository of knowledge" identity was pretty clear for around a decade (at least for main Q&A, not Chat or Discussions). It was inconsistently enforced because the volume of low-quality questions exceeded the ability of the "moderators" to enforce it. At its peak, the backlog of questions in the process of being closed was about a full month's worth of question volume (this doesn't include questions that did get closed or questions that didn't yet start the process of being closed).

The golden age of SO was when all the important questions that have accumulated over decades were getting asked and answered. SO stabilized once that backlog got finished, and then started dying once people moved to github issues for project-specific questions. Chatgpt just replaced the last remaining type of questions ("plz do my work for me"), which arguably shouldn't have been getting asked in the first place.

SO wasn't a discussion forum, it was wikipedia for programming. It was already dying long before the question rate dropped off, since most new questions were "plz write/debug my code for me" which tend to be the sort of question that SO was not designed for. Chatgpt replaced that, and github issues replaced project-specific debugging. Now there's nobody left to write/read/answer the small amount of questions that are still a good fit.

But that's only assuming that your original data structure already has space for the algorithm to store metadata. If there's space that can be manipulated freely to store metadata, can't you just remove that space to save memory, and then use the extra space for a stack?

What's the utility of this? It's arguably still using a stack, just encoded in the original data structure itself. If your original data structure somehow uses colors but is also fine with the algorithm overwriting with its own colors, I guess it works? But those are very unusual preconditions. For any real world scenario I can imagine, I feel like there's a better solution.

If the colors in your original data are important, then you can't really just overwrite them and/or assume that the algorithm can use its own colors. You're going to have to add a stack.

If your original data doesn't have colors, adding a stack is better than integrating metadata into the original data structure.

If for some reason your original data has colors but they aren't considered important, then just remove the colors and add a stack.

If your concern is about dynamic memory, preallocate static memory equal to the size of the original data structure.

> text is my highest-signal communication channel

I'm a little surprised by this. Due to the prevalence of spam, I favor private third-party messaging applications (slack, discord). Text messaging is about 50% garbage for me, and the majority I leave unread. Though contrary to the experience of a lot of others, I almost never get spam phone calls (probably <10 in the last two years), so that remains my highest signal channel.

I'm on a non-touchscreen mac, on firefox with smooth scrolling turned off, and have LinearMouse installed. I tried both trackpad scrolling and mousewheel scrolling. The weird "smooth" scrolling of this website is very jarring to me, and makes it take significantly longer to scroll to where I want to, since the responsiveness went from ~instant to ~.5s and I keep on overshooting.

I feel like normal security issues don't get much publicity. The PHP and eMudhra issues seemed severe, and worth publicity. But then with things like this, I'm not sure. Is this a severe issue? Or is it just a run of the mill issue that's only newsworthy because web security is on people's minds right now?

technical accuracy aside, this made me giggle like a madman

It's very economically feasible if it pumps up the stock price